Abstract

Consumers’ resistance towards chatbot agency questions the quality of human-computer interaction, and thus, invites further investigation on factors determining chatbot efficiency. Current study addresses the above challenges by providing understanding on functionality and enjoyment, emerging as crucial drivers of satisfaction. Consumers who have used chatbots at least once in their daily life were invited to complete a survey, evaluating the interaction with the bot. The results are clear in showing that information quality, accuracy and competence are pivotal for chatbot functionality. Personal care and social presence enhanced interactivity perception and the enjoyment of the chatbot use. These factors might however turn into barriers when not met, as reported by consumers in low satisfaction group. Current findings provide valuable insights for developing and implementing chatbot applications to satisfy the user demand for enjoyable and functional interaction, through enhanced information quality, competence, personal care and social presence.

Introduction

Despite the increased implementation of chatbots (software applications for on-line chat conversation via text or textto-speech) in Marketing and everyday context, the technology is still experiencing shortages and being not always accepted by consumers. Chatbots have been incorporated by various companies as e-service agents to substitute the direct contact with a live human agent (Lee & Choi, 2017), to facilitate the customer services (Chung et al., 2020), to better manage customer relationship (Libai et al., 2020). The aim of all these applications is to provide enhanced customer experiences.

A question arises hereby: whether chatbots currently available at the market offer such enhanced experience, to appropriately meet consumer needs and demands? It turns out that consumers are resistant, questioning the technology readiness (Flavi
an et al., 2022) and usefulness (Xie et al., 2022). Although the necessity of high quality and easy to use chatbots has been recognised, the technology is still at its infancy, encountering several challenges (Bialkova, 2021; 2022). Part of the challenge reflects the need to understand the factors determining the quality and ease of use perception. Not surprisingly then, several lab studies addressed quality of chatbots (Ben Mimoun et al., 2017; Chung et al., 2020; Lou et al., 2022) and the ease of use (Meyer-Waarden et al., 2020). It was reported that quality and ease of use shape the attitudes towards chatbots, and thus, the intention to use in the future. Recent study, exploring consumer opinion about chatbots currently available at the market, confirmed the role of quality and ease of use on attitudes formation (Bialkova, 2022). The study further showed that both, cognitive (e.g., functionality, interactivity) and affective (e.g., enjoyment) components are crucial for quality and ease of use perception.

Conclusions

Current study aimed to explore potential factors determining functionality, interactivity and enjoyment, emerging as crucial drivers of chatbot quality and ease of use perception. A survey was addressed to EU consumers who have used a chatbot at least once in their daylily life. This is one of the contributions of the present paper. While, earlier studies mainly focussed at exploring consumer experience with chatbots mock-ups, they might lack understanding on chatbots currently available at the market, and the actual user evaluation.

Another major contribution of the current work is the investigation of both, cognitive (e.g., functionality) and affective (e.g., enjoyment) aspects of interaction with chatbots. In previous studies these aspects were mainly addressed in separate research. Hereby we encompassed functionality, enjoyment and interactivity determinants in a holistic framework.